Wait, what? Wasn’t the cause of the Irish Potato Famine that a large proportion of the population was solely reliant on the potato as their primary nutrition, so when the blight developed they had nothing else, and a million people died?
That said, I don’t know the counter-factual history of where Ireland didn’t have the potato and millions died for other reasons, so you may be right in sum.
I liked the weird, awkward zoom into the logo at the end. It seems like someone had a great idea in their head for how the modern zoom would look, but the technology just wasn’t there yet. Some director was just ten years ahead of his time.
(Or they were trying to copy the look from someone who did it successfully, and they failed.)
You’d also have to look at the actions of the English as absentee landlords that impoverished the Irish, took over the best land to raise cattle for them, leading to the Irish being dependent on potatoes that could grow in the crappy soil.
OH sorry, that did come out wrong. Ireland is sort of known for their potatoes, and their famine you mentioned. End statement. But they were also used in France when other crops went south one year. IIRC, it was been awhile since I saw the short informative video on it.
Though as a side note for foods that are now seen synonymous with certain cultures, tomatoes are a New World food too.
IIRC too, that is where we get the term Boycott from. A guy who owned a ton of land in Ireland and the UK, who pissed of his tenants so much that they refused to harvest his crops, and no one in town would do it either, and so he had to hire out side help, which cost many times more than the actual value of the crops.
Yeah yeah yeah sure, I could go and read a bunch of books and stuff, but I was just confused by the comment on how the potato saved millions of Irish people from starvation without further explanation, when the only thing that people think of when you stick the words “Irish” and “potato” together are “famine.”
This was an interesting read about that:
If you don’t like Bert Lahr as an Indian, you’re really not going to like this other movie that he plays in lion-face.
What about the lion actor he put out of a job?!
Arbeit Macht Lays
It is interesting. And maybe, in light of it, this isn’t the best example of whitewashing and yellowface, merely one of the more recent and prominent ones. But it’s still a common phenomenon in film. (But, then again, WTF is the deal with picking a famous Asian you admire but don’t know for a conversation about diversity and a brewing controversy?)
Related is the phenomenon of all-white (or mostly white) casts for historical epics set in places where you’d expect to see some brown faces.
How many sci-fi movies have a token black guy who doesn’t make it to the end?
And so on.
I just don’t buy the notion that Hollywood lost all its racist inclinations in the 80s.
I think in this particular case the whitewashing in the casting is not entirely straightforward. Had they cast someone they could’ve said it was stereotyping, though could’ve been fixed with the proper writing. And i think Marvel would’ve been happy to oblige… however the sole reason it went to Tilda had more to do with China’s history with Tibet, and Marvel desperately trying to milk as much money as they could from this new character/property. They would’ve done anything to please the Chinese market in exchange for them sweet sweet moneys.
Honestly i find THAT much more disturbing than blind whitewashing, because it was not ignorance that drove it. It was greed (and in China’s place, systemic repression and genocide).
Oh, I’m sure of that.
Well, at least the other Marvel movie that tried to adapt a stereotypical Asian villain had Sir Ben Kingsley (né Krishna Bhanji), take up the role of the Mandarin. Although… Wait a minute…
That’s Sir Ben Kingsley to you.
And Iron Fist, a role that would’ve been better suited as an opportunity for Marvel to cast an asian-american actor. Even though the original character is white, it would’ve been good to have some diversity. But nope, totally went with a white guy, despite the fact that the guy that got cast as one of the main antagonists for the show was actively fighting hard to play the hero.
Fixed.
Somewhere along the way, at least in certain parts of the US, it seems that we stopped teaching parents how to parent. I certainly experienced the latchkey era, but my sister and I were of junior high age before that ever happened, and it was no big deal back then. Besides, if the weather was good enough, I’d be out and about with my buddies on bicycles. We knew when we were expected to be back home, we knew not to open the door to strangers, and what to do in emergencies.
I’m glad that, at least in my area, I still see kids out on bikes and skateboards whenever the weather is decent, and their parents aren’t risking jail because of it. I even saw kids jumping their bikes off a ledge between two parking lots they way we did it with our Sting-Rays 40+ years ago (back when Evel Knievel was all the rage). This time, though, they actually had helmets and protective gear, things that didn’t even exist back then.
Well, weirdly, I grew up in the American Southwest in white suburbia, but I also had a number of friends and acquaintances on various Arizona reservations - mostly the Navajo, Hopi, and San Carlos Apache - and we ALL thought that “indian giver” referred to the repeated practice of whites giving things to the Indians (usually by treaty or other promise), and then subsequently taking them back.
It wasn’t until I went off to college that I heard the whole “potlatch symbolic reciprocal giving misunderstood as western-style gifting” explanation for the ‘racial insult’ interpretation.
When I mentioned it to a couple of my friends on the rez later, they were as surprised as I was at the “Indians as givers/takers” interpretation.
One of them, in fact, thought it was a pretty silly explanation, and “probably made up by someone who’s never met an Indian.”
The “white men as thieving promise-breakers” just made a whole lot more sense to all of us. (-:
I grew up in a pretty suburban area, and for sure i distinctly remember conversations on how to answer the door and phone appropriately. Or when not to answer them. As kids we were given a lot of freedom, but it wasn’t like my parents didn’t care. I feel bad for kids who are being raised by parents who feel the need to hover over their kids and don’t give them their own space to just be a kid and do dumbass kid stuff.
Definitely not grumbling over how good the old says were compared to how “whipper snappers” are being raised. I know times change, but i do worry about what’s being lost when a kid doesn’t have their own safe space to explore and do their own thing without an adult towering over them. But i do get the need to keep them safe, especially with news of kids being abducted and worse.
Off topic. i know.
Maybe it’s true. Just don’t tell the Belgians that.
